Generation Famous: YouTube Life Is Complex On Both Sides Of The Screen

This video was produced by my former student, and YouTuber, Marissa Isgreen.

The Anaheim Convention Center is flooded.

It is June 23, VidCon 2016 is just getting underway as I walk from Harbor Boulevard with a river of badge-wearing, bag-toting, youngsters. The pace is quick, the chatter even faster. They flow in, gripping smartphones and small cameras, ready to capture what will be many firsts.

Kim Turner has never been to California before. In fact, before an airplane at Clinton National Airport, in Little Rock, Ark., taxied to the runway threshold and lifted into the air toward a connecting flight in Houston, Turner had never flown. Now she is sitting on a fountain’s edge at the Grand Plaza of the convention center, talking about who she is going to meet.

“I like the interaction,” she says. “They’re almost like friends, because they’re talking to you. I like that.”

Turner is not a teen. She’s 45 years old. Her life as a YouTube fan started when her daughters, Kayana, 12, and Katara Nicole, 19, showed her a video of Dillon's.

“This isn’t actually too bad,” Turner, an office manager back in Little Rock, remembers thinking. And pretty soon she was hooked. But that’s not what brought them halfway across the country.

“This one right here,” Kim says, pointing to Katara Nicole, “she’s actually a YouTuber. She’s been talking about wanting to come to VidCon for a couple of years.”

Katara Nicole hands me a business card.

What exactly is digital video fandom? For one, it’s a term many YouTubers reject (see the video above) in favor of something more relational, like friendship or family. On the other hand, as I wrote about last week, a strong digital family outgrows the ability for the each member to communicate directly with the mater or pater familias. It gets more complicated than that, too, because there is a kind of fluidity from fan-to-friend in digital life that can’t be replicated in physical life.

“How much time do you spending watching YouTube?” I ask 9-year-old Jakob of Portage, Ind., who’s at his first VidCon.

He smiles. “Too much.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I spend, at least, over eight hours a day,” he replies, adding a few moments later, “normally less during the school year.”

“So when you say it’s too much,” I continue, “what would you be doing if you weren’t doing that?”

“Minecraft,” he replies, “or just talking to friends.”

“When you’re not playing Minecraft or watching YouTube, how much time do you spend with friends out in the world?”

“We normally just talk over Skype,” he replies. “Because in our neighborhood, they’re all grown up and everything. So, normally, we’ll talk for an hour.”

“And those are friends in other parts of the country or who live in your hometown?”

“Most of them are in different parts of the country,” he says. “I normally only talk to four people.”

How did they meet?

“Through Minecraft,” he says.

Fluidity is as common as the firsts at VidCon. Even “fan” and “famous” is fluid from year to year. Five years ago, another young YouTube fan from Mussel Shoals, Ala., came to VidCon and met Shane Dawson and “all my YouTube friends,” including the guys from SMOSH, Grace Helbig and Jenna Marbles. For any VidCon goer in 2016, that would mean winning a lot of meet-and-greet lotteries, but ...

Moving from fan to famous has always been the norm in entertainment, but that journey is different here. Katara Nicole’s goal at VidCon is not to be “discovered,” it is to learn how to build, improve and grow on her own terms. She belongs to the Multi-Channel Network Awesomeness TV, but they can’t make her a YouTube star. They supply her with the tools. She will make her own way from there and that’s where VidCon can help.

VidCon is many things at once. It is a showcase, a way to connect fans and digital stars, an exhibition for any smart company wanting to reach the latter end of Generation Y and the heart of Generation Z. But it also an industry convention in the truest sense, with three days of talks by experts on improving everything from content strategy and video technique to promotion and contracts. It includes keynote speeches, private parties thrown by industry leaders and innumerable side meetings across multiple lounges in the convention center and adjacent hotels.

It is overwhelming what Katara Nicole could be accomplishing here and, two weeks after the convention is over, the feeling of awe and accomplishment lingers.

“In the VidCon app,” she writes in an email, “it lists every event that will be happening and you can schedule all of the things that you want to go to. I had a long list but I didn't get to go to everything on that list. I was either having fun in the Expo Hall, doing something super cool with AwesomenessTV, or meeting up with Internet friends. There were just so many things to do at VidCon and with this being my first time going, I found it a bit difficult to plan my time just the way I wanted to. I had a lot of fun nonetheless and can't wait to go again next year!”

On her Facebook page, Katara Nicole to her friends and family,

“After VidCon, I decided to make some changes to my channel and relaunch it bigger and better than before. I hope to finally start making the content that I've always wanted to make.”

She is smart, down-to-earth, approachable and dynamic on camera.

She could do this.

“It’s not as easy as you think,” Kim, her mom, says in the Grand Plaza. “But it’s worth it to see the smile on her face. She’s been through some hard times.”

Parents arrive unified by the children’s excitement, but they vary in their own enthusiasm about, and knowledge of, digital stars.

Inside the convention center, at the far end of the main hall, is a large room defined by a curtain wall. It is comfortably outfitted with both high and low tables, and a few couches, but it is a not quiet space. The many events just a few feet away blare a cacophonous cloud of sound into the space. Parents who are willing to send their children into the mayhem, tethered by their phones, either chat with other parents or get a lot of reading done.

Rudy Ramirez, a police officer from Walnut, Calif., tells me his daughter started talking to him about VidCon a year ago.

“She went online and showed me videos from past VidCons,” says Ramirez, 43. “I have a 16-year-old son whose big into the Comic-Con, so I understood that.”

After seeing both, Comic-Con makes more sense to him.

“Growing up the fan of comic books myself, I had a lot more interest,” Ramirez says.

“Has your daughter shown you channels as a way to explain why it matters?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Do you get it?”

“I get some of it,” he says. “Some of it is humorous and some of the musical acts are extremely talented. Other stuff, not so much.

“Why do think it doesn’t connect with our generation,” I ask. “Because some people really hate it.”

“I don’t hate it,” he says. “It’s just, for me, some of it seems, without trying to be too harsh, a waste of time maybe. I just have too much going on to dedicate to following something like that.”

Dedication is a good word. YouTube alone generates content at unfathomable levels, and when you add in Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Vine and a host of smaller platforms, keeping a tight relationship with several creators takes time.

Most of us watch some digital video. From cat fails to the latest citizen journalist capturing breaking news, how to use a lathe to late night talk show karaoke, digital video turns heads of all ages. According to a Pew poll last year, 31 percent of adults have posted a video online and 72 percent reported using some video sharing site, but not all watching is equal. For some, watching only begins the experience.

Melissa Moatts, from Lancaster County, Penn., whose 16-year-old daughter watches “Sweety Pie all the time,” doesn't have time to be YouTube fan herself, but she has seen the effect the network has on her daughter.

“My daughter’s not a loner, but she doesn’t have a lot of friends [in her hometown],” Moatts says. “And this is her connection to people.”

Much of the connection starts in comment sections, which no one would argue are havens of communal harmony. YouTube comment sections have been called a cesspool, a place of hidden sadness, YouTube itself has tried to address the problem, and even its biggest star, PewDiePie, shut off his comments two years ago saying, “I go to the comments and it’s mainly spam, it’s people self-advertising, people are trying to provoke ... just all this stuff that to me it doesn’t mean anything.”

His point was that he couldn’t see what his real fans were saying. Four weeks later, he turned comments back on and offered other ways for fan to communicate with him. But even this weekend, two videos show that the open forums will forever complicate the lives of digital creators. In one video, he directly addresses his “#1 HATER,” and the other shows how multi-layered this connection gets at the scale of millions. In the video, he talks about an app he just released, a bot based on his visage and personality, that can have conversations with users. But in the video, he is forced to address many negative comments about the fact that the app wasn’t free and he eventually offers a compromise—a limited version of the app at no cost. When I last looked, that video had 23,000 comments. It is a never-ending cycle.

More than five years ago, Paul Ford, a developer, entrepreneur and writer, explained why YouTube’s comment section satisfied what he argued was the fundamental question of the web: Why Wasn’t I Consulted? WWIC. He writes:

“The site has comments, so people can discuss the videos—a second level of WWIC. But there are now also thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons so that you can rank the comments and the video, a third level of WWIC.

Once you see that third level, a website is complete. You're down to the bedrock.”

Generation Famous is consulted at almost every turn and, for all of its warts and horrors, this free flow can be dangerous, but it can also improve some lives. Like Katara Nicole’s.

“YouTube has helped me with my anxiety more than I ever thought possible,” Katara Nicole wrote to me in email after VidCon. “I found it easier to talk to a camera rather than an actual person, which sounds pretty sad but it actually helped me with that social anxiety and talking to people in the long run. A lot of people from school had learned about my channel and they were all curious about it. A few people even came up to me a few times telling me about how much they loved my channel and watching YouTubers in general. That sparked a great conversation. It was really nice to talk to people who understood my love for YouTube. Making YouTube videos also helped me with confidence which, I think is a big part of my anxiety. I became more confident when I began making videos and I think that's really helped with my anxiety.”

I think about that while I watch her video, “Life of a Highschool Dropout.” I’m not sure I could ever be this honest.

“My 'Life of a High School Dropout' video really terrified me,” she writes. “I knew I'd wanted to talk about it on my channel though. One of the main reasons I created my channel was to feel like I could help others out with my videos and hopefully make them feel better. I knew it'd be a step out of my comfort zone but it was something I really wanted to do. I let everything out in that video and it felt really good to be able to open up to my subscribers and even people who weren't subscribed to me. I never really got to talk to anyone about how the whole situation made me feel, so getting to open up about it on my channel was great. I got so many amazing comments from people who were glad that I was on my journey to happiness and others who were going through the exact same thing I was.”

For Ricky Dillon, who has sailed the YouTube waters from super fan to super famous, the question of fandom, how it’s named and defined, is really left up to the people who generate it. But in his own mind, a friendship of sorts does emerge.

“When you’re making a video, how do you picture [your viewers]?” I ask.

“I don’t picture a million people watching,” he says. “I picture a conversation.”

“Did you picture that way as a fan too?”

“Yeah, what’s cool about YouTube is that on a blog or personal video it’s just like your talking to someone. It’s not like a movie, where it’s a character. It’s on a personal level, you get to know someone.”

“Was there a number where it hit you, this is getting bigger than I conceive meeting that many people?”

“Maybe a couple hundred thousand.”

“Really?" I say. "For me that would have been at, maybe, five thousand.”

“Oh really?”

“You didn’t feel famous at 5,000 subscribers?”

“I guess not,” says Dillon, who will hit 3 million subscribers soon.

After Dillon and I speak, I walk down to a large hall, through a metal detector, into the room where viewers who won lotteries get to meet their favorite creators. Parents get to join their children for this, even if they didn’t buy a community pass. It is hug after hug, selfie after selfie, tears of joy flow, but it is all amazingly calm.

Maybe it is the security presence. Maybe it’s the organized lines for each YouTuber who stands in a bay welcoming the next fan. Maybe the monumental moment that this represents in these young lives creates a certain hush. Dillon’s publicity manager has another thought: Maybe these fans have done so many of these by now, they can handle the intensity.

Two days later, on Saturday evening, the Grand Plaza has been drained of most people. I am walking toward Harbor Avenue with a few bag-toting, badge-holding youngsters who still have energy to spare, though the pace and chatter have slowed.

In Katara Nicole’s latest video she says, “Oh, we have a new YouTuber book added to the collection, Ricky Dillon over there,” as she points to a bookcase behind her, “It’s actually not mine, it’s my mom’s.”

“There were a lot of firsts on that trip,” she continues. “And we had so much fun, that we’re going back next year to VidCon. And I’m so excited, it can’t get here soon enough.”

Back in Anaheim, on that first day when I was sitting in the flood with Kim Turner, I asked her what she first thought when Katara Nicole told her she wanted to start a channel.

“I was a little hesitant about it at first,” she admits, “putting herself out there. But I’ve seen how much she wanted to do it, that I said, 'If this is what you want to do, and it makes it happy, do it.'”

As far as getting the family to VidCon itself, it was no small sacrifice for Turner.

“It was more than the average vacation, but then again, it was worth more,” she says.

“Why do you say that?” I ask.

“The smile on her face since we landed in Los Angeles.”

Next Week: 'Sitting Around Making YouTube Videos' -- You Probably Can't Do It